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At the risk that moralizing
here also shows itself to be what it always has been—that is, an unabashed
montrer ses plais [display of one’s wounds], as Balzac says—I’d like to
dare to stand up against an unreasonable and harmful shift in rank ordering that
nowadays, quite unnoticed and as if with the clearest conscience, threatens to
establish itself between science and philosophy. I think that on the basis of
our experience—experience means, as I see it, always bad experience?—we
must have a right to discuss such a higher question of rank, so that we do not
speak like blind people about colour or as women and artists do against science
(“Oh, this nasty science!” their instinct and embarrassment sigh, “it always
finds out what’s behind things”—). The declaration of independence of
the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler
effects of the nature of and the trouble with democracy: today the
self-glorification and self-exaltation of the scholar stand everywhere in full
bloom and their finest spring—but that is still not intended to mean that in
this case self-praise smells very nice. “Away with all masters!”—that’s what the
instinct of the rabble wants here, too, and now that science has enjoyed its
happiest success in pushing away theology, whose “handmaiden” it was for too
long, it has the high spirits and stupidity to set about making laws for
philosophy and to take its turn playing the “master” for once—what am I
saying?—playing the philosopher. My memory—the memory of a scientific
man, if you’ll permit me to say so!—is filled to bursting with the naiveté I
have heard in arrogant remarks about philosophy and philosophers from young
natural scientists and old doctors (not to mention from the most educated and
most conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both of
these thanks to their profession—). Sometimes it was a specialist and idler who
in general instinctively resisted all synthetic tasks and capabilities;
sometimes the industrious worker who had taken a whiff of the otium [leisure] and
of the noble opulence within the spiritual household of the philosopher and, as
he did so, felt himself restricted and diminished. Sometimes it was that colour
blindness of the utilitarian man, who sees nothing in philosophy other than a
series of refuted systems and an extravagant expense from which no one
“receives any benefit.” Sometimes fear of disguised mysticism and of an
adjustment to the boundaries of knowledge sprang up; sometimes the contempt for
particular philosophers, which had unwittingly been generalized into a contempt
for philosophy. Finally, among young scholars I most frequently found behind the
arrogant belittlement of philosophy the pernicious effect of a philosopher
himself, a man whom they had, in fact, generally ceased to follow, but without
escaping the spell of his value judgments dismissing other
philosophers—something which brought about a collective irritation with all
philosophy. (For example, Schopenhauer’s effect on the most modern Germany seems
to me to be something like this: with his unintelligent anger against Hegel he
created a situation in which the entire last generation of Germans broke away
from their connection to German culture, and this culture, all
things well considered, was a high point in and a prophetic refinement of the historical
sense.(1)But Schopenhauer himself in this very
matter was impoverished to the point of genius—unreceptive and un-German.) From
a general point of view and broadly speaking, it may well have been, more than
anything else, the human, all-too-human nature of the more recent philosophers
themselves, in a word, their paltry spirit, which has most fundamentally damaged
respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instincts of the rabble. We
should nonetheless acknowledge the extent to which the whole style of
Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and of whatever all those royal and splendid
hermits of the spirit were called is absent from our modern world and how, given
the sort of representatives of philosophy who nowadays, thanks to fashion, are
just as much on top as at the bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of
Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann—an
honest man of science is entitled to feel that he is justifiably of a
better sort, with a better descent. In particular, the sight of these mishmash
philosophers who call themselves “reality philosophers” or “positivists” is
capable of casting a dangerous mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young
scholar: they are, in the best of cases, scholars and specialists
themselves—that’s clear enough—they have been, in fact,
collectively defeated and brought back under the rule of science.(2)
At some time or other they wanted more from themselves, without having
any right to this “more” and to its responsibilities—and now, in word and deed,
they represent in a respectable, angry, vengeful way the lack of faith [den
Unglauben] in the ruling task and masterfulness of philosophy. But
finally—how could it be anything different? Science nowadays is in bloom, its
face is filled with good conscience, while what all recent philosophy has
gradually sunk to—this remnant of philosophy today—is busy generating suspicion
and ill humour against itself, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to
“theory of knowledge” is, in fact, nothing more than a tentative epochism [Epochistik] and
a doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy which does not venture one step over the
threshold and painstakingly denies itself the right to enter—that
is philosophy at death’s door, an end, an agony, something pitiful! How could
such a philosophy—rule!(3)

205

To tell the truth, there are so
many varied dangers for the development of a philosopher today that we may well
doubt whether this fruit can, in general, still grow ripe. The scope and the
tower-building of the sciences have grown into something monstrous, and with
these the probability that the philosopher has already grown tired while he is
still learning or lets himself stop somewhere and “specialize,” so that he no
longer reaches his full height, that is, high enough for an overview, for
looking round, for looking down. Or else he reaches that point too
late, when his best time and power are already over, or have become damaged,
coarsened, and degenerate, so that his glance, his comprehensive value judgment,
means little any more. The very refinement of his intellectual conscience
perhaps allows him to hesitate along the way and to delay. He is afraid of being
seduced into being a dilettante, a millipede, something with a thousand
antennae. He knows too well that a man who has lost respect for himself may no
longer give orders as a man of knowledge, may no longer lead. At that
point, he would have to be willing to become a great actor, a philosophical
Cagliostro and spiritual Pied Piper, in short, a seducer. In the end it’s a
question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Moreover, by
way of doubling once again the difficulty for the philosopher, it comes to this:
he demands from himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but
about life and the value of living—he learns with reluctance to believe that he
has a right or even a duty to make this judgment and that must seek his own path
to that right and that belief only through the most extensive—perhaps the most
disturbing, the most destructive—experiences, often hesitating, doubting, and
saying nothing. As a matter of fact, the masses have for a long time mistaken
and misidentified the philosopher, whether with the man of science and ideal
scholar, or with the religiously elevated, desensualized, “unworldly” enthusiast
drunk on God. If we hear anyone at all praised nowadays on the ground that he
lives “wisely” or “like a philosopher,” that means almost nothing other than
“prudently and on the sidelines.” Wisdom: that seems to the rabble to be some
kind of escape, a means and a trick to pull oneself well out of a nasty game.
But the real philosopher—as we see it, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and
“unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of
a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he always puts himself at
risk. He plays the wicked game. . . .

206

In comparison with a genius,
that is, with a being who either engenders or gives birth, taking both
words in their highest sense—the scholar, the average scientific man, always has
something of the old maid about him, for, like the old maid, he does not
understand the two most valuable things men do. In fact, for both scholars and
old maids we concede, as if by way of compensation, that they are respectable—in
their cases we stress respectability—and yet having to make this concession
gives us the same sense of irritation. Let’s look more closely: What is the
scientific man? To begin with, a man who is not a noble type. He has the virtues
of a man who is not distinguished, that is, a type of person who is not a ruler,
not authoritative, and also not self-sufficient. He has diligence, a patient
endorsement of his position and rank, equanimity about and moderation in his
abilities and needs. He has an instinct for people like him and for what people
like him require, for example, that bit of independence and green meadows
without which there is no peace in work, that demand for honour and
acknowledgement (which assumes, first and foremost, recognition and the ability
to be recognized—), that sunshine of a good name, that constant stamp of
approval of his value and his utility, which is necessary to overcome again and
again the inner suspicion at the bottom of the hearts of all dependent
men and herd animals. The scholar also has, as stands to reason, the illnesses
and bad habits of a non-noble type: he is full of petty jealousy and has a lynx
eye for what is base in those natures whose heights are impossible for him to
reach. He is trusting, but only as an individual who lets himself go but does
not let himself flow. Before a person who is like a great stream he
just stands there all the colder and more enclosed—his eye is then like a
smooth, reluctant lake in which there is no longer any ripple of delight or
sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable he
gets from his instinctive sense of the mediocrity of his type, of that
Jesuitical mediocrity, which spontaneously works for the destruction of the
uncommon man and seeks to break every arched bow or—even better!—to relax it.
That is, to unbend it, with consideration, of course, naturally with a
flattering hand—to unbend it with trusting sympathy: that is the
essential art of Jesuitism, which has always understood how to introduce itself
as a religion of pity.—

207

No matter how gratefully we may
accommodate ourselves to the objective spirit—and who has never been
sick to death of everything subjective and its damnable ipsissimosity
[references to itself]!—we must ultimately also learn caution concerning
this gratitude and stop the exaggeration with which in recent years we have
celebrated the depersonalizing of the spirit, emptying the self
from the spirit, as if that were the goal in itself, redemption and
transfiguration.(4)
That’s what tends to happen, for example, in the pessimism school, which, for
its part, has good reasons for awarding highest honour to “disinterested
knowledge.” The objective man who no longer curses and grumbles like the
pessimist, the ideal scholar, in whom the scientific instinct, after
thousands of total and partial failures, all of a sudden comes into bloom and
blossoms fully, is surely one of the most precious implements there are, but he
belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we say. He is
a mirror—he is no “end in himself.” The objective man is, in fact, a
mirror: accustomed to submit before everything that wishes to be known, without
any delight other than that available in knowing and “mirroring back”—he waits
until something comes along and then spreads himself out tenderly so that even
light footsteps and the spiritual essences slipping past are not lost on his
surface and skin. What is still left of his “person” seems to him accidental,
often a matter of chance, even more often disruptive, so completely has he
himself become a conduit and reflection for strange shapes and events. He
reflects about “himself” with effort and is not infrequently wrong. He readily
gets himself confused with others. He makes mistakes concerning his own needs,
and it is only here that he is coarse and careless. Perhaps he gets anxious
about his health or about the pettiness and stifling atmosphere of wife and
friends or about the lack of companions and society—indeed, he forces himself to
think about his anxieties: but it’s no use! His thoughts have already wandered
off to some more general example, and tomorrow he knows as little as he
knew yesterday about how he might be helped. He has lost seriousness for
himself—as well as time. He is cheerful, not from any lack of needs,
but from a lack of fingers and handles for his own needs. His habitual
concessions concerning all things and all experiences, the sunny and uninhibited
hospitality with which he accepts everything which runs into him, his kind of
thoughtless good will and dangerous lack of concern about Yes and No—alas, there
are enough cases where he must atone for these virtues of his!—and as a human
being he generally becomes far too easily the caput mortuum [worthless
residue] of these virtues. If people want love and hate from him—I mean
love and hate the way God, women, and animals understand them—he’ll do what he
can and give what he can. But we should not be amazed when it doesn’t amount to
much—when he reveals himself in these very matters as inauthentic, fragile,
questionable, and rotten. His love is forced, his hate artificial, more a tour
de force, a tiny vanity and exaggeration. He is genuine only as long as he
is permitted to be objective: only in his cheerful comprehensiveness [Totalismus] is
he still “nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, always smoothing itself out,
no longer knows how to affirm or deny. He does not command, and he does not
destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien” [There is almost nothing I despise]—he says with Leibnitz: we should not fail to hear
and underestimate that presque [almost]!(5)
Moreover, he is no model human being. He does not go ahead of anyone or behind.
He places himself in general too far away to have a reason to take sides between
good and evil. When people confused him for such a long time with the philosopher,
with the Caesar-like breeder and powerhouses [Gewaltmenschen] of
culture, they held him in much too high honour and overlooked the most essential
thing about him—he is an instrument, something of a slave, although certainly
the most sublime form of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien [almost
nothing]! The objective man is an instrument, an expensive, easily damaged
and blunted tool for measurement and an artful arrangement of mirrors, something
we should take care of and respect. But he is no goal, no way out or upward, no
complementary human being in whom the rest of existence is justified,
no conclusion—and even less a beginning, a procreation and first cause. He is
nothing strong, powerful, self-assured, something that wants to be master. He is
much rather merely a delicate, inflated, sensitive, and flexible pot for forms,
which must first wait for some content and meaning or other, in order to “give
itself a shape” consistent with it—usually a man without form and content, a
“selfless” man. And thus also nothing for women, in parenthesi [in
parenthesis].—

208

When a philosopher nowadays
lets us know he is not a sceptic—I hope people have sensed this from the
description of the objective spirit immediately above?—the whole world is
unhappy to hear it. People look at him with some awe and would like to ask so
much, to question . . . in fact, among timid listeners—and there are hordes of
them today—from that point on he is considered dangerous. For them it is as if
in his rejection of scepticism they heard coming from far away some evil
threatening noise, as if a new explosive was being tested somewhere, spiritual
dynamite, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin, a pessimism
bonae voluntatis [of good will], which does not merely say
No and will No but—terrible to imagine!—acts No!(6)
Against this form of “good will”—a will to a truly active denial of life—there
is today, by general agreement, no better sleeping pill and sedative than
scepticism, the peaceful, gentle, soporific poppy of scepticism, and even Hamlet is
prescribed these days by contemporary doctors against the “spirit” and its
underground rumblings. “Aren’t people’s ears all full enough already of wicked
noises?” says the sceptic, as a friend of peace and quiet, almost as a sort of
security police: “This subterranean No is terrifying! Be quiet at last, you
pessimistic moles!” For the sceptic, this tender creature, is frightened all too
easily. His conscience has been trained to twitch with every No, even with a
hard, decisive Yes—to respond as if it had been bitten. Yes! And No!—that
contradicts his morality. Conversely, he loves to celebrate his
virtue with a noble abstinence, perhaps by saying with Montaigne, “What do I
know?”(7)
Or with Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Or “Here I do not trust myself.
There is no door open to me here.” Or “Suppose the door was open, why go in
right away?” Or “What use are all rash hypotheses? Not to make any hypotheses at
all could easily be part of good taste. Must you be so keen immediately to
straighten something crooked? Or to stop up every hole with some piece of
oakum? Isn’t there time for that? Doesn’t time have time? O you devilish
fellows, can’t you wait, even for a bit? What is
unknown also has its attraction—the Sphinx is a Circe, too, and Circe also was a
philosopher.”(8)
In this way a sceptic consoles himself, and he certainly needs some consolation.
For scepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain multifaceted
physiological condition which in everyday language is called weak nerves and
infirmity. It occurs every time races or classes which have been separated from
each other a long time suddenly and decisively cross breed. In the new
generation, which has inherited in its blood, as it were, different standards
and values, everything is restlessness, disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best
forces have an inhibiting effect; even the virtues do not allow each other to
grow and become strong; the body and soul lack equilibrium, a centre of gravity,
a perpendicular self-assurance. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerates
in such mixtures is the will. These people no longer know the
independence in decision making, the bold sense of pleasure in willing—they have
doubts about the “freedom of the will,” even in their dreams. Our Europe today,
the scene of an insanely sudden attempt at radical mixing of classes and consequently of
races, is as a result sceptical in all heights and depths, sometimes with that
flexible scepticism which leaps impatiently and greedily from one branch to
another, sometimes gloomy, like a cloud overloaded with question marks, and
often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of the will—where nowadays do we not
find this cripple sitting! And often how well dressed! In such a seductive
outfit! This illness has the most beautifully splendid and deceitful clothing.
For example, most of what presents itself in the display windows today as
“objectivity,” “the practice of science,” “l’art pour l’art” [art
for art’s sake], “purely disinterested knowledge” is only dressed up
scepticism and paralysis of the will—I’ll stand by this diagnosis of the
European disease. The sickness of the will has spread unevenly across Europe. It
appears in its greatest and most varied forms where the culture has already been
indigenous for the longest time, and it disappears to the extent that the
“barbarian” still—or again—achieves his rights under the baggy clothing of
Western culture. Thus, in contemporary France, we can conclude as easily as we
can grasp it in our hands that the will is most seriously ill, and France, which
has always had a masterful skill in transforming even the fateful changes in its
spirit into something attractive and seductive, truly displays its cultural
dominance over Europe today as the school and exhibition hall for all the charms
of scepticism. The power to will and, indeed, to desire a will that lasts a long
time, is already somewhat stronger in Germany, and in the north of Germany even
more so than in the middle, but it’s significantly stronger in England, Spain,
and Corsica. In Germany it’s bound up with apathy, and in those other places
with hard heads—to say nothing of Italy, which is too young to know yet what it
wants and which first must demonstrate whether it can will.—But it’s strongest
and most amazing in that immense empire in between, where Europe, so to speak,
flows back into Asia, that is, in Russia. There the power to will has for a long
time lain dormant and built up, there the will waits menacingly—uncertain
whether, to borrow a favourite phrase of our physicists today, it will be
discharged as a will to negate or a will to affirm. It may require more than
wars in India and developments in Asia for Europe to be relieved of its greatest
danger; it will require inner revolutions, too, the breaking up of the empire
into small bodies and, above all, the introduction of the parliamentary
nonsense, along with every man’s duty to read his newspaper at breakfast. I’m
not saying this because it’s what I want. The opposite would be closer to my
heart—I mean such an increase in the Russian danger, that Europe would have to
decide to become equally a threat, that is, it would have to acquire a will,
by means of a new caste which would rule Europe, a long, fearful, individual
will, which could set itself goals for thousands of years from now—so that
finally the long spun-out comedy of its small states, together with its
multiple dynastic and democratic wills, would come to an end. The time for petty
politics is over. The next century is already bringing on the battle for the
mastery of the earth—the compulsion to grand politics.

209

The extent to which the new
warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may perhaps also be
favourable to the development of another and stronger variety of scepticism—on
that point I’d like to state my views only provisionally through a parable which
friends of German history will understand easily enough. That harmless
enthusiast for good-looking, tall grenadiers, who, as King of Prussia, brought
into being a military and sceptical genius—and in the process basically created
that new type of German who has just recently emerged victorious—the
questionable and mad father of Frederick the Great—in one
respect himself had the grip and lucky claw of genius.(9)
He knew what Germany then needed, a lack which was a hundred times more
worrisome and more urgent than some deficiency in culture and social style. His
aversion to the young Frederick emerged from the anxiety of a profound instinct.
What was missing was men. And he suspected to his most bitter annoyance
that his own son might not be man enough. On that point he was deceived, but who
in his place would not have been deceived? He saw his son decline into atheism, esprit, the pleasure-loving
frivolousness of witty Frenchmen:—he saw in the background the great blood
sucker, the spider of scepticism. He suspected the incurable misery of a heart
that is no longer hard enough for evil and for good, of a fractured will that no
longer commands, is no longer capable of commanding. But in the
meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new form of
scepticism—who knows how much it was encouraged by that very hatred of
his father’s and by the icy melancholy of a will pushed into solitude?—the
scepticism of daring masculinity, which is most closely related to the genius
for war and conquest and which, in the shape of Frederick the Great, first
gained entry into Germany. This scepticism despises and nonetheless grabs hold.
It undermines and takes possession. It does not believe, but in so doing does
not lose itself. It gives the spirit a dangerous freedom, but it keeps a firm
grip on the heart. It is the German form of scepticism, which, as a
constant Frederickianism [Fridericianismus] intensified into the
highest spirituality, has brought Europe for some time under the dominion of the
German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the invincibly
strong and tenacious masculine character of the great German philologists and
historical critics (who, if we see them properly, were collectively also artists
of destruction and subversion), gradually anew idea of the German spirit
established itself, in spite of all the Romanticism in music and philosophy, an
idea in which the characteristic of manly scepticism stepped decisively forward:
it could be, for example, a fearlessness in the gaze, courage and hardness in
the dissecting hand, a tough will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for
expeditions to the spiritual North Pole under bleak and dangerous skies. There
may well be good reasons why warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross
themselves when confronted with this particular spirit: Michelet, not without a
shudder, calls it cet esprit fataliste, ironique,
méphistophélique [this fatalistic and ironic Mephistophelean spirit].(10)
But if we want to sense how distinctive this fear of the “man” in the German
spirit is, through which Europe was roused out of its “dogmatic slumber,” we
might remember the earlier idea which it had to overthrow—and how it is still
not so long ago that a masculine woman could dare, with unrestrained
presumption, to recommend the Germans to the sympathy of
Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, poetical idiots.(11)
Finally, we should understand with sufficient profundity Napoleon’s surprise
when he happened to see Goethe: that reveals what people had thought about the
“German spirit” for centuries. “Voilá un homme!” [There is a man!]—which
is, in effect, saying: “That is really a man! And I had expected only a
German!”—

210

Assuming, then, that in the
image of the philosophers of the future there is some characteristic which
raises the question whether they would not perhaps have to be sceptics, in the
sense indicated immediately above, that would, nonetheless, indicate only one
thing about them—and not what they themselves were. With just as much
justification they could let themselves be called critics, and it’s certain they
will be people who experiment. In the names with which I have ventured to
christen them, I have already particularly emphasized experiments and their
enjoyment in attempting experiments. Did I do this because, as critics in body
and soul, they love to use experiments in a new, perhaps broader, perhaps more
dangerous sense? In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further
with daring and painful experiments, than could be considered appropriate by the
soft-hearted and mollycoddled taste of a democratic century? There is no doubt
that these coming philosophers will be least of all able to rid themselves of
those serious and not unobjectionable characteristics which separate the critic
from the sceptic—I mean the certainty in the measure of value, the conscious use
of a unity of method, the shrewd courage, the standing alone, and the ability to
answer for themselves. In fact, they confess that they take delight in
saying No and in dissecting things and in a certain thought-out cruelty, which
knows how to guide the knife surely and precisely, even when the heart is still
bleeding. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only on
themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not get involved with the
“truth,” so that the truth can “please” them or “elevate” them and “inspire”
them:—by contrast, they will have little faith that the truth itself
brings with it such emotional entertainment. They will smile, these strict
spirits, if someone should declare in front of them, “That idea elevates me: how
could it not be true?” or “That work delights me: how could it not be
beautiful?” or, “That artist enlarges me; how could he not be great?”—Perhaps
they are prepared not only to smile at but also to feel a genuine disgust for
everything equally enthusiastic, idealisic, feminine and hermaphroditic. Anyone
who knew how to follow them right into the secret chambers of their hearts would
hardly find there any intention to reconcile “Christian feelings” with “the
taste of antiquity” or even with “modern parliamentarianism” (a reconciliation
which is said to be taking place even among philosophers in our very uncertain
and therefore very conciliatory century). These philosophers of the future will
demand not only of themselves critical discipline and every habit which leads to
purity and strictness in things of the spirit: they could show them off as their
own kind of jewellery—nonetheless, for all that they still do not wish to be
called critics. It seems to them no small insult inflicted on philosophy when
people decree, as they are so fond of doing today, “Philosophy itself is
criticism and critical science—and nothing else!” This evaluation of philosophy
may enjoy the applause of all French and German positivists (—and it’s possible
that it would have flattered even the heart and taste of Kant: we
should remember the title of his major works—): our new philosophers will
nonetheless affirm that critics are the tools of the philosopher and for that
very reason, the fact that they are tools, are still a long way from being
philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg [Kant]
was only a great critic.

211

I insist on the following
point: people should finally stop confusing philosophical labourers and
scientific people in general with philosophers—in this particular matter we
should strictly assign “to each his due” and not give too much to the former and
much too little to the latter. It may be that the education of a real
philosopher requires that he himself has once stood on all of those steps where
his servants, the scientific labourers in philosophy, remain—and must
remain. Perhaps he must himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and
historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and solver of
riddles and moralist and prophet and “free spirit” and almost everything, in
order to move through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able to
look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the heights into
every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every
expanse. But all these things are only preconditions for his task: the task
itself requires something different—it demands that he create values.
Those philosophical labourers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to
establish some large collection of facts concerning estimates of value—that is,
earlier statements of value, creations of value that have become dominant and
for a while have been called “truths”—and press them into formulas, whether in
the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. The
task of these researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has
been valued up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything lengthy, even “time” itself, and to overpower the
entire past, a huge and marvellous task, in the service of which every
sophisticated pride and every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. But
the real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they say “That is how
it should be!” They determine first the “Where to?” and the “What for?”
of human beings, and, as they do this, they have at their disposal the
preliminary work of all philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered
the past—they reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that
process, everything that is and has been becomes a means for them, an
instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating; their creating is
establishing laws; their will to truth is—will to power.—Are there such
philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not necessary that
there be such philosophers? . . . .

212

It is increasingly apparent to
me that the philosopher, who is necessarily a man of tomorrow and the
day after, has in every age found and had to find himself in
contradiction to his today: his enemy every time was the ideal of the day. Up to
now all these extraordinary promoters of humanity whom we call philosophers and
who themselves seldom felt that they were friends of wisdom but rather
embarrassing fools and dangerous question marks, have discovered that their
work, their hard, unsought for, inescapable task—but finally the greatness of
their work—was for them to be the bad conscience of their age. By applying the
knife of vivisection directly on the chest of the virtues of the day,
they revealed what their own secret was—to know a new greatness for
man, to know a new untrodden path to increasing his greatness. Every time they
exposed how much hypocrisy, laziness, letting oneself go, and letting oneself
fall, how many lies lay hidden under the most highly honoured type of their
contemporary morality, how much virtue was out of date; every time they
said, “We must go there, out there, where you nowadays are least at
home.” Faced with a world of “modern ideas” that would like to banish everyone
into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher
these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea
of “greatness,” directly on the basis of man’s range and multiplicity, of his
integrated totality in the midst of diversity. He would even determine value and
rank according to how much and how many different things one person could endure
and take upon himself, how far he could extend his own responsibility.
Today contemporary taste and virtue weaken and dilute the will; nothing is as
topical as the weakness of the will. Thus, in the ideal of the philosopher it is
precisely the strength of will, hardness, and the ability to make lengthy
decisions that must be part of the idea “greatness”—with just as much
justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a stupid, denying,
humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an opposite age, one which
suffered, like the sixteenth century, from the bottled-up energy of its will and
from the wildest torrents and storm tides of selfishness. At the time of
Socrates, among nothing but men of exhausted instincts, among conservative old
Athenians, who allowed themselves to go “for happiness,” as they said, and for
pleasure, as they did, and who, in the process, still kept mouthing the old
splendid words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, perhaps
irony was essential for greatness in the soul, that malicious Socratic
confidence of the old doctor and member of the rabble, who sliced ruthlessly
into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the “noble man,” with a look
which spoke intelligibly enough “Don’t play act in front of me! Here—we are the
same!” By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe is the only one who
attains and distributes honours, when “equality of rights” all too easily could
get turned around into equality of wrongs—what I mean is into a common war
against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul,
the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and
mastery—these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of
being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one’s
own initiative—these are part of the idea “greatness,” and the philosopher will
reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes “The man who is to be the
greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most
deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly
endowed with will—this is precisely what (T)greatness(T) is to be called:
capable of being as much an integrated totality as he is something multifaceted,
as wide as he is full.” And to ask the question again: today—is greatness possible?

213

What a philosopher is, that’s
difficult to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it out of
experience—or one should have the pride not to know it. But the fact
that these days the whole world talks of things about which it cannot have
any experience holds true above all and in the worst way for philosophers and
philosophical situations: very few people are acquainted with them and are
allowed to know them, and all popular opinions about them are false. And so, for
example, that genuine philosophical association of a bold, exuberant
spirituality, which speeds along presto, with a dialectical strictness
and necessity which takes no false steps is unknown to most thinkers and
scholars from their own experience, and hence, if someone wishes to talk about
it in front of them, they find it implausible. They take the view that every
necessity is an affliction, a painful requirement they must follow, a
compulsion, and thinking itself they consider something slow, hesitant, almost
laborious, and often enough “worth the sweat of the noble”—but under no
circumstances something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high
spirits! “Thinking” and “taking an issue seriously,” “considering it
gravely”—among them these belong together: that’s the only way they have
“experienced” thinking. In such matters artists may have a more subtle sense of
smell. They know only too well that at the very moment when they no longer
create “voluntarily,” when they make everything by necessity, their sense of
freedom, refinement, authority, of creative setting up, disposing, and shaping
is at its height—in short, that necessity and the “freedom of the will” are then
one thing for them. Ultimately there is a rank ordering of spiritual conditions,
with which the rank ordering of problems is consistent, and the highest problems
shove back without mercy anyone who dares approach them without having been
predestined to solve them with the loftiness and power of his spirituality. What
help is it if nimble heads of nondescript people or, as happens so often these
days, clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists with their plebeian ambition press
forward into the presence of such problems and, as it were, up to the “court of
courts”! But on such carpets crude feet may never tread: there is still a
primeval law of things to look after that: the doors remain closed to these
people who push against them, even if they bang or crush their heads against
them! One must be born for every lofty world: to put the matter more clearly,
one must be cultivated for it: one has a right to philosophy—taking the
word in its grand sense—only thanks to one’s descent, one’s ancestors; here, as
well, “blood” decides. For a philosopher to arise, many generations must have
done the preparatory work. Every single one of his virtues must have been
acquired, cared for, passed on, assimilated, and not just the bold, light,
delicate walking and running of his thoughts, but, above all, the willingness to
take on great responsibilities, the loftiness of the look which dominates and
gazes down, the feeling of standing apart from the crowd and its duties and
virtues, the affable protecting and defending of what is misunderstood and
slandered, whether god or devil, the desire for and practice of great justice,
the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires,
seldom looks upward, seldom loves. . . .